The r/K Selection Model
August 11, 2021
By AHNZ
Biology has long recognised the adaptations animals have made to their environment. Structural adaptations such as tails, legs, claws, horns, quills, wings, teeth, thumbs are the reason animals don’t all look the same. Behavioral adaptations such as hibernation, nest and nest building, migration, aggression and camouflage are the reason animals don’t all act identically. The same is true of reproductive adaptations and even within a single species, humans, different subsets of our population employ different strategies to bring young into the world.
Sea turtles lay and leave. As the babies hatch and make their way to the relative safety of the sea they are picked off from above by hungry gulls. Abandoned by their parents, the only concession to survival of the species is that there are large numbers of babies so that in a slim chance at least some of them will live to grow and have babies themselves one day.
This ‘spray and prey’ strategy is the same sort used by spiders whose young drift off on the wind. Chance will take many to their doom the same way plant seeds mostly land on barren or occupied ground. Other species go the other way entirely by having few babies but investing parenting effort to protect and feed and even educate their young before letting the dangerous world loose on them. Mammals rear their young and none so more than we humans. The human parent takes responsibility for meeting another animal’s security, shelter, sleep, warmth, food, hygiene, education needs for years at a time. After handing over each of these capacities at an age-appropriate rate the parent has raised an adult and perhaps even an improved generation to the previous.
As a species, the human reproductive strategy is K-selected because it is bent toward serving a high carrying (K) capacity for the species. The K finds and holds every opportunity in a territory, establishing an equilibrium between how many people there are and how much the land can sustain.
However, within our K species we have cultural variations. Some people and populations lean more toward being a purist K and others go the other way, r. The r-selected humans have a set of values/drives that influence them to have many children with low parental investment in order to increase the reproductive rate (r) of the species. If you take a perceptive look at a given New Zealand family now, or in our history, it’s not too hard to figure out which of these reproductive strategies it has adopted.
“Not something you want to rush into, obviously…There’s no way we could have a child now. Not with the market the way it is, no.” – K-selected mother” – K-selected parents
Mother: “Oh, shit, I’m pregnant again!” Clevon, “Shit! I got too many damn kids! – I thought you was on the pill or some shit!”Mother, “Hell, no!” Clevon, “Shit! I must’ve been thinkin’ of Brittany.” – r-selected parents
Ref. Idocracy (2006)
Intelligence: The r-selected New Zealander is low IQ, the K-selected high IQ. Brain power is a waste of calories better spent on having more babies quickly for those of us determined to face a fatal world. For those of us who seek to master our environment (which humans are brilliant at doing when they wish to be) we need to be intelligent and protect our children. Children raised by K parents grow up K too because their intellect is nurtured.
Wealth: The r-selected mindset views food as an endless sea of grass and plenty. He didn’t make it and he doesn’t own it, it is to be shared equally. President Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012 appealed to the r’s who voted for him when he said “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” (Ref. wiki) The K-selected were as mortified as the r-selected were thrilled because they were very much under the impression that they had built that.
While the K-selected try to balance the national accounts and reduce national debt the r-selected side know of no amount of money they should not print. To ask “How will we pay for this,” is a K question and “If it moves, tax it” is an r-selected answer to most questions.
Investment in Offspring: By definition, the K will exchange their property and give their life to save that of their child or a member of their kin group. Colonial New Zealand was built by large extended families bound together in K-hood alliances and Colonial Otago is famous for the K-selected Presbyterian fixation on educating their young. To the r-selected this is individualism gone mad, putting all your eggs in one basket instead of spreading your eggs far and wide for the benefit of the collective. “Every sperm is sacred,” they chant and they don’t mean every child they mean spawning.
Like a quokka that will actually toss its own babies to a predator, the r-selected humans are the ones in our society that take the pro-abortion side of the abortion debate. Germaine Greer is reported to have said her abortions were as insignificant to her as flossing her teeth. The K-selected are mortified at the idea of treating even an unborn child as disposable. From the K-perspective abortion is an act of murder on one of their fellow New Zealanders, a person with a soul in need of rescue.
In-group preferences: If something so r-selected as rabbits are under attack they will scatter and flee. Realistically, a prey species such as deer or wilderbeast have the muscle to resist and repel an attack from some big cat K-selected predator except that this would be against their nature. The K-selected animal, on the other hand, would not leave a member of its pack to be picked off to save its own life. Human K-selected communities act more life wolf packs in this respect, intent on protecting the members of their kin group or even their cultural kin group. In extremis, this also explains why a K would identify the unborn child of a stranger as a fellow Kiwi and try to save them from being terminated at the abortion clinic. The r-selected New Zealanders, when attacked, scatter in every direction like rabbits or sheep, for the good of the group at the expense of the individual. They are fair-weather friends ready to abandon one another or live on their knees rather than become extinct; The K will change the world because it wont change him, preferring death before dishonor, to die on his feet rather than life on his knees. Eg. Ref 1942: Coming and Going
New Zealand’s gun debate (aka civil war) is also an offshoot of this gene war. Not being fighters, the r-selected have no use for teeth or claws which are only used to hunt them so they would like them banned. The same logic applies to firearms which r-selected people don’t have in their culture except as a threat. The K, on the other hand, is not passive or deterministic when it comes to security. They are under the impression that they can protect themselves, contrary to Obama’s “you didn’t build that” they think they can and have constructed protection. Note also, a disarmed population leads to more danger and crime and disorder which is where r-selected people thrive and K-selected peoples interests are hurt. So, of course r-selected people want to ban guns. Time will tell if Labour 6.0’s ‘Gun Buy Back’ proves that disarming the population leads to an increase in crime, killing, and disorder.
Sex: For r-selected, the best sex is early and often. Promiscuity is important as opposed to the monogamy of the K. As intent as the r is in destroying the institution of concepts like ‘marriage’, ‘husband’, and ‘wife’, the K is at pains to maintain them and to promote a strong pair bond between man and women. The K is opposed to pre-marital sex and under-aged sex for the same reason the r seeks them out and both groups duel in the legislature trying to criminalise the behavior of their opposite. If the r or K can create and hold the legal and cultural environment to hinder the other side and help their own then, while it lasts, more children will be born who join the ranks of one or the other reproductive strategy.
More single mothers is in the best interests of the r-selected. Putting men into jail, into wars, into work camps, out of families etc. is what helps the r-selected flourish. A child born into a fatherless world is under a strong influence to add to the chaos and conflict upon which r-selected interests depend. Of course Feminists, along with being abortionists, promote hostility toward men/Patriarchy. Feminists agitate for wars or even for men to be imprisoned for ‘crimes’ or ‘hate speech’ best defined as thinking/saying/acting like a K-selected man. The creation of the Domestic Purposes Benefit (1973) was a fantastic Victimhood Culture win for Labour 3.0 because it replaced fatherhood with The State so provided an artificial stimulant to the r-selected population in ever-increasing doses.
Both factions battle over serotonin, the attachment neurotransmitter. If a young person, especially a woman, can be persuaded to burn our their re-uptake of serotonin ability by serial promiscuity they will not be able to pair bond. Instead, hearts are broken and sex becomes casual and separated from love; More babies result though of less quality. On the other hand, the K would prefer sex to occur after marriage so that the release of serotonin can take its natural affect of bonding a couple together so they can raise a family. K-couples ‘own’ each other, r-couples rent each other. No wonder this basic battle plays out over and over, back and forth, in our history books. The Netflix show Cuties (2020) or the various projects to expose children to age-inappropriate sexualisation in schools, art, and public libraries are simply r-selected offences on K-culture. When sexual deviant Grace Millane was killed in 2018 the r-culture made sure it was not interpreted as a promiscuous risk-taker lucking out but rather a general problem with women’s safety in New Zealand.
The r-selected Cultures: Objections start to arise now as to how these definitively less intelligent and less wealthy r-selected people with their disorderly lives manage to get it together long enough to rival the K. How can a low-IQ culture dominate the media, press, literature, academia, government, religion, philosophical discourse, legislation, and other mainstream outlets? In short, they can’t! They are the Slave Culture, a protected class, a fatalistic prey class. An anonymous collectivist mob who run from a challenge and refuse to compete.
The main actor and driving force behind r-selected culture is not Slave Culture but Victimhood Culture. Here is a Moral Culture that exists to exploit the r-selected as a people farm. A vote plantation. When there are masses of r-selected people who vote and hunger and spend and consume this imbues the spokesmen for this group with huge power. Victimhood Culture makes its living being the advocates, protectors, priests, politicans, public service, Social Justice Warriors in the guise of being the r-selected group’s best friend. So much surplus value is created by the mob in terms of spending and votes and legislative mandate that there is enough to finance the Victimhood Culture. These bourgeois socialists make their living agitating for and prolonging the r-selected wave of human energy and coaxing others to pay for it for as long as they can. Eventually and always, the partnership comes undone due to the infinite promises of the VC to meet the infinite demands of the SC; Clown World is the End Game for the r-selected mainstream.
The dangerous driving force of the r-selected is not the mob, not the Black-Indigenous-People-Of-Colour or LGBTQ, not the Maoris, no the Muslims, nor the Pacific Islanders. The main actors are wealthy white women and their beta males, defectors from the K-selected cause. They live in fine houses, eat expensive food, care for their children, form pair bonds, are sensitive to slight and take everything very personally, care very much for territory and group-belonging, demand credit for things they create, are intellectual and climb high in every hierarchy. This explains why Labour 6.0 has been headed by Jacinda Ardern, the Kiwi Khaleesi, the wealthy white savior of the r-selected protected class.
Competition: The K-selected pursue excellence as individuals and relish competition. To hit that on the head at an early age the champions of r-selected culture make sure to ban it. Having taken over New Zealand’s primary schools, the r-selected simply abolish competition and hand out participation prizes instead. Our schools have also been transformed to lower quality education facilities by such means as open plan classrooms in place of single units. These are excellent growing conditions for r-selected children to thrive while utterly toxic to K-children. Ref. Flagship of current model schooling: Haeata Community College
Many of our primary schools were once K-selected institutions, built by K-selected Colonists, but they have fallen like castles to the r-selected side who now run them. As usual, these tend to be women and tend to be white and the ‘best’ of them climb the hierarchy to roles and professions such as becoming a politician. (Ref. “Politics and education are the two main employment categories of Labour MPs… Labour MPs were most likely to have had no single dominant career, or to have worked for government in some way.”; NZ Herald (2014))
“All that separates, whether of race, class, creed or sex is inhuman and must be overcome.” – Kate Sheppard, Victimhood Culture Icon
The K comfort with competition ties in with their in-group preference. The K seeks to identify and protect his family, his community, his country, his province, his nation, his country, his empire. The r-selected hate that idea and have been successful in abolishing most of those things. Eg. Labour 1.0 extinguished our British citizenship in 1943, provinces were abolished in 1875, most borough councils were abolished and amalgamated in 1989. Auckland used to contain multitudes of unique individual communities and even had 27 mayors, now it has been blended into one big supercity (2010.) The K-selected love diversity and celebrate their differences to others. Playing off against others brings out the best in them and many friendly K-selected rivalries have produced much of our best work. Besides which, keeping a healthy mistrust for foreign groups ensures they don’t try any funny business such as trying to take our stuff.
The r couldn’t be more different. They don’t see individuals, they see one mass species of disposable units to the greater good of the collective species. Some of the very r-selected cheerleaders even go beyond species and advocate that animals, plants, even environmental systems themselves are all part of the same organism. This extreme anti-individuality comes through in the rhetoric of Kate Sheppard who wanted to “overcome” race, class, sex as “inhuman” because they “separate.” Jacinda Ardern, likewise, described a “globalised, borderless world” not just for us but for “all people.” Such sentiments are music to the r-selected ears as much as they are agony to the K-selected.
History Playing Out
I hope you will appreciate why Anarchist History of New Zealand spends so much time remarking about r vs K selection in so many articles. There’s no such thing as a true model but there are useful ones and, like Moral Cultures, the r/K model is a very powerful way to summarise vast patterns of historical trends. It’s a useful bit of mental furniture that has worked out pretty well so far.
Without some sort of deliberate framework to understand historical change we will end up having an unconscious and non-deliberate one anyway so we’re better off making a choice so we can be mindful and logical as we explore.
At any given time, New Zealand K-culture can be observed to be rising or falling in inverse relationship to r-culture. One is always in the underground, destined to rise again, to peek, to fall, to regroup, to rise again. We’ve done this 10 times now but no two eras are ever the same. The world outside changes, technology changes, generations change, and we learn our lessons about why our broad reproductive strategy was defeated last time so we try new things. Here is why history doesn’t repeat, not strictly speaking, but it does rhyme.
Right now r-selected culture permeates the mainstream and seems so strong that it might never end. But it always ended before. And the stronger the r-selection the harder it falls, the more profound and constructive the K era to follow will be. Based on how ‘Woke’ and ‘Social Justiced’ New Zealand and the West has been this r-selected era there are some very good times ahead for the K-selected. The coming 2020s and 2030s have the potential be our most creative, inventive, energetic time in history. At such times we increase our national wealth, invent new medicines and abolish illness, advance in science and arts, explore new reaches. Keep a look out for the next John Grigg, Rutherford, Pickering, Hillary, and next Barratt-Boyes.
Of course, unless we’re conquered while our guard is down, our journey will not end there. While we’re in our next K-selected era there will be sleeper agents. The children growing up and socialising to the r-selected mainstream right now will, when they come of age, bring back the r-selected culture all over again. Rinse and repeat.
If there’s a better way than this for people to live then humanity hasn’t figure it out just yet. It seems to be a stable system if you don’t mind the odd castle burning or empire falling or dark age. It also seems that we can make these cultural transitions now fairly peacefully whereas in the past people had to die violently. Still, I hope that something better comes along.
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Ref. r/K selection theory, Wiki
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